Bush is going soft in the head. Halfway through the match, Bush wants to kick over the table the chess board is on and start a brand new game of chess. Is this not a manifest symptom of senile dementia? Nope! Rules are made to be changed until you find the rules you can win with. If you can't win under your own house rules, make up new ones!
Bush has failed at nearly every benchmark the he (not Congress) established to evaluate the progress of the surge, so now five years into the war and half dozen failed mission statements later, it's time for New Rules Vol. 5 (the 2007 Al Anbar edition)
NEW RULES VOL. 5 (2007 AL ANBAR EDITION)
By George W. Cheney, Commando-In-Chief, America
Rule #1 The bad guys (the Sunni Baathist minority) are now the good guys. The former supporters of Saddam, the ruthless dictator we hung from the gallows last year, aren't so evil after all. Sunni minority is good, Shiite majority is bad. Got it?
Rule #2 Prime Minster Nouri Maliki, the guy that Bush had 100% confidence in six months ago is now a disgruntled and incompetent fool who won't play ball, by knuckling under to get the oil revenue bill passed in parliament. Remember that oil revenue bill?...the deal where global petroleum companies skim 80% of the oil revenues in post war Iraq. Maliki is now the big obstructionist stopping America from accomplishing the big oil mission! We've got to punt him out of the stadium at any cost.
Rule #3 The new Green Zone is in al Anbar, not Baghdad. We now have 10,000 surge troops who have locked down a 10 mile circumference of a territory in al Anbar province and that's the new Green Zone! The New al Anbar Rule: Nobody leaves al Anbar without getting shot at a security checkpoint and nobody enters al Anbar without getting shot at a security checkpoint.
There you go, all of your security problems solved by establishing 2,500 shot to kill checkpoints, each checkpoint within 50 feet of the last one, all in a nice circle where everybody is safe. With each passing year the security circle expands to a little bit more territory (around 15 yards per year) and pretty soon, all of Iraq is surrounded by one big circle of security checkpoints. . We call it Operation Creeping Checkpoint. Dick Cheney thought up the name for that tactic. Pretty cool name, huh?
Voila! Thanks to Dick Cheney we all of that democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people is up and running in Iraq!
Rule #4 The tribal warlords of the al Anbar region are the new freedom fighters against the wicked and evil Shiite democracy the United States established in Baghdad, two years ago. Sunnis were evil under the old rules, now we've got to pass out 200,000 AK 47s and Glocks and other military freewarez to the Sunnis. Those same Baathist freedom fighters in al Anbar, who used to prop up the wicked and evil dictatorship in Baghdad that Saddam Hussein established, are the new heroes of Operation Iraqi Confusion. If we pass enough guns and suitcases full of unmarked American money to the thugs and warlords in al Anbar, they'll fight on anybody's side in a war, even the United States! If all else fails, we pass out WMD to our new Sunni heroes!
Rule #5 We now have a timetable for Iraq. It's called the 2008 Presidential Election Timetable. For the next year we stall and surge, stall and surge and stall and surge some more. For the next year we pretend that victory is imminent in Iraq but reconciliation is only possible if Americans elect a big strong Republican president who won't cave in and join the Democratic Party surrender crowd. If we act like a bunch of peacenik crybabies and elect a Defeatocrat president, then THAT'S IT...al Qaeda will cross the Atlantic Ocean in a flotilla of rowboats and bring the war to America.
Rule #6 Final Rule: No more smart ass remarks or trick questions from American surrender monkeys like "What the hell is going on around here?" or "Are we living in some kind of idiocracy where the President can sandbag everybody into fighting a war that nobody wants?" That kind of negative innuendo sends the wrong message to the terrorists and gets your name on the NSA Central Data Mining Enemy List of people who are going to "get it" from the FBI. We've got your number pal, and we'll deal with you later.
Pay no attention to the disclaimer in the box below, it's just some legal mumbo jumbo that nobody cares about:
Caveat Emptor: All rules are subject to change without notification given to Congress or the American public. If you want to know how we can just make up the rules as we go along, we can't tell you because that information is classified.
Now that we all understand the new rules let's get more "Support the Troops" stickers on those car bumpers, put those glow in the dark Jesus statutes on your dashboard and your American flag pins on your lapels. This time around we're going to really get the job done over in Iraq! We may be going to hell in a grocery cart, but at least God came along for the ride!